Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor

by Scott, James M.

  Doolittle had learned on April 28 that Arnold had promoted him to brigadier general. He would for the second time in his career skip a rank, a promotion he knew would only reinforce the idea of some of his contemporaries that he was Arnold’s fair-haired boy. Doolittle did not have any stars to wear, so Clayton Bissell, who also had just been promoted to general, gave him a set. “He offered me a swig from his high-priced Scotch whiskey in celebration and I took a large gulp, which he didn’t appreciate,” Doolittle recalled. “He estimated my gulp was worth about $80.” Doolittle’s men were thrilled at the news of his promotion, as Hilger recorded in his diary: “We’re all as happy as if each one of us had been made a general too.”

  The rest of the raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and, like the earlier group, met with Chiang. Doolittle later had the cap he wore over Tokyo cleaned and then gold braid sewn into it before he sent it to Madame Chiang. “My second in command, Jack Hilger, received the highest Chinese decoration,” he recalled. “Then when I walked in, Chiang and his wife looked at each other and realized that something had gone wrong with the presentation ceremony—they didn’t have a decoration to give me. Chiang looked toward one of his highly decorated generals, approached him, and removed a beautiful decoration from around his neck. He then hung it on me. It is said that the Chinese are emotionless, but that general sure showed emotion when stripped of his medal by the Generalissimo!”

  Doolittle’s copilot, Dick Cole, used his downtime in the Chinese capital to fire off a letter to his parents back home in Ohio. “I realize you are probably both worried and wondering as to my whereabouts and safety. The long silence on my part was imperative and someday you will know why,” he wrote. “It is pretty hard to write a letter without writing about your activities, but I guess it’s O.K. to tell you that I have had my first taste of combat and find it not too bad. ‘Lady Luck’ is still riding on my shoulder and I hope she stays there in the future.” Cole closed with an observation of how the raid had affected him and his views. “The last four weeks have vindicated my life-long opinion—that there is no place as good as the United States—No place.”

  Each of the raiders who passed through Chungking sat down and completed a detailed report of the raid and its aftermath under the supervision of Colonel Merian Cooper, one of the Army Air Forces’s more colorful officers. A forty-eight-year-old former bomber pilot, Cooper was wounded in aerial combat behind enemy lines during World War I, suffering severe burns and sitting out the rest of the war in a German hospital. He recovered and flew volunteer missions against the Russians in the 1919–21 Polish-Soviet war, where in July 1920 he was shot down again and captured. Cooper managed to escape after ten months in prison, a feat that required him to slit the throat of a Russian soldier. Cooper’s thirst for exploration and adventure proved a natural fit in Hollywood—The New Yorker dubbed him the “T. E. Lawrence of the movies”—where he went on to create the 1933 film classic King Kong. Like Doolittle, Cooper had remained in the Army Reserves, requesting foreign duty as soon as the war broke out.

  As the debriefing officer for the raid, Cooper would ultimately sit down with fifty-nine of the raiders, including Doolittle. “I can remember you well—open neck, unshaved, dirty clothes, but still full of fire,” Cooper wrote in a 1971 personal letter to Doolittle. “You gave me the map I still have, marking where you thought your lost crews were, in your handwriting.” Hilger described the debriefing experience in his diary. “It seems that I have done nothing but write all day long,” he griped on May 5. “It has taken us longer to write the reports on this mission than to fly it.”

  Doolittle departed May 5 for the United States flush with the one hundred dollars Cooper had lent him to cover any expenses, a debt the general repaid to Cooper’s wife in Alexandria, Virginia. “Had it not been for his kindness—and affluence, I would have had the Devil’s own time getting home,” Doolittle wrote her. “As it was, I arrived just about destitute.” Just before Doolittle left, Cooper made him a promise. “I told you I would do the best I could for all your men,” he later wrote to him. “I did.”

  Armed with Doolittle’s map of where the missing crews likely were captured—and information provided by the generalissimo’s chief of intelligence and secret police—Cooper proposed a rescue operation and requested $10,000 in gold coins for bribery. “I had used gold coins in my explorations in the 1920’s in Persia, Arabia, Siam, Abyssinia, etc., and found they worked magic when paper money meant nothing,” he wrote. “I felt gold coins would do the same in China and among the Japanese.”

  Cooper outlined his plan to Bissell, who then gave him the go-ahead. “I told him that I would either bring back the prisoners alive, or I would not come back. I meant I would be dead. I did not intend to be captured and tortured by the Japanese and then executed,” Cooper later wrote to Doolittle. “If it was evident that I was going to be captured by the Japanese, I intended to kill myself; but I didn’t think this would happen. I felt quite confident I could bring out the Doolittle crew prisoners alive.”

  The next morning, when Cooper went to retrieve the gold, Bissell told him the operation had been killed. Cooper never learned why, though it would haunt him for decades. “I was pretty broken up by the cancellation of my proposed rescue mission. I thought I was eminently qualified to carry it through successfully. After all, I had escaped from a Russian prison near Moscow—after ten months there—and walked over 200 miles, living in the open, in dangerous Communist country, stealing and begging food from the peasants, sleeping in the melting snow, and swimming over one hundred ice-cold streams and rivers,” he wrote years later to Doolittle. “I have never written the story of my escape, as it looks too fantastic and incredible. But I considered it more difficult than rescuing your men—but they didn’t let me.”

  TED LAWSON’S CONDITION continued to deteriorate. He suffered a terrible night on April 25, forcing Doc White to give him a blood transfusion. The doctor recruited Griffith Williams to serve as the donor, since he and Lawson shared type A blood. “I had no means of doing a proper crossmatching so had to take the chance of sub-groups and a reaction,” White later wrote in his unpublished memoir. “We had the expected trouble with clogging needles and syringes, but managed to get in 150 cc the first try and later after cleaning and boiling the outfit, 200 cc on the second try. Ted seemed stronger afterward.”

  Missionary Frank England held a prayer service at the hospital the next morning for the aviators, and then White accompanied England to his home, where he built a modified Rodger Anderson splint to help Lawson’s leg. “Installing the splint was a painful process,” White wrote, “but immobolizing the knee joint and elevating the leg made him more comfortable and I hoped would improve drainage.”

  The magistrate brought the aviators a large basket of oranges, while other municipal and military officials arrived with gifts of raisins, grapefruit, wine, and canned butter. A group of children came from a town forty miles away to deliver 450 eggs.

  On April 27 Smith, Williams, Sessler, Saylor, and Thatcher departed via sedan chair for Chuchow, leaving behind White and the injured airmen. “We all sent letters out with them,” White wrote. “We felt pretty lonesome after they had gone.”

  Lawson continued to struggle, prompting White the next day to give him chloroform and operate on his leg to enlarge his wounds and improve drainage. The procedure almost proved too much for Lawson. “Ted stopped breathing,” White wrote. “I had some anxious moments before we could get him going properly again.”

  The surgery appeared to help. The next day White dressed his wounds, which he noted in his diary looked much better. Afterward he went into town, where he bought a thermos for $120 and twenty tablets of sulfanilamide for $40. Lawson’s reprieve proved short-lived. By May 1 his leg again looked bad, leading White to grind up his entire supply of sulfanilamide tablets into power, which he applied to his wounds.

  A local doctor from the Plague Prevention Unit and Public Health Hospital at Kinw
ah arrived with morphine, more sulfanilamide, and a blood transfusion kit. White went to work immediately. Both Clever and McClure were still weak, so rather than take a full pint from either, he took just enough from both to give Lawson 500 cubic centimeters. “Lawson no better,” White wrote in diary on May 3. “I’m afraid he’ll lose that leg.”

  White wired Chunking the next day after the Sunday service to see whether it might be possible to dispatch a seaplane that could land on the river, but he received no response. “By Monday Lawson was in such poor shape that it was evident that both his leg and his neck could not be saved,” White later wrote. “So we decided to amputate.”

  The doctor appeared next to Lawson’s bed on May 4. The pilot sensed White’s sudden unease and asked whether he planned to take his leg.

  “Yeah,” the doctor said. “I think so.”

  White was stoic; the situation, nonnegotiable. “Doc didn’t ask me how I felt about it,” Lawson later recalled. “So, after a bit, I said I wished he’d get started. All I could think of now was getting rid of that damned thing.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” White answered.

  The Parkers entered and tried to comfort Lawson with talk of his wife and soon-to-be-delivered baby, while Chen explained that the men planned to use spinal anesthesia, an ampoule of novocaine smuggled out of Shanghai at White’s request.

  Lawson tried to joke that the surgery would make him walk with a shoe with high instep, but White failed to answer. He knew then the doctor planned to amputate more than just his foot and ankle. He pressed White on where he planned to cut.

  “Above the knee,” he said. “I’ll leave you as much as I can.”

  Lawson asked why he couldn’t cut lower.

  “If I did that, I might not get enough off. Then there would have to be another one,” White said, “and your system couldn’t take it.”

  The men rolled Lawson on his side, and White injected the novocaine into his lower spine. Attendants moved him onto a stretcher and carried him to the second-floor operating room in a nearby building.

  Mrs. Smith sterilized the packs and instruments, many of which, White noted, were of 1890s vintage. She and Chen then scrubbed in along with White. Lawson would be awake during the surgery, but numb from the waist down.

  The surgical team used drapes to block off the infected part of Lawson’s left leg and cinched a tourniquet as high on the thigh as possible. “We had to make our skin incision about the middle of the thigh in order to get a decent margin of healthy tissue above the infected area,” White later wrote in his memoir. “I made fairly large skin flaps and undercut each layer of muscle as I came to it. The large vessels were clamped and tied as we came to them, though because of the tourniquet they naturally didn’t bleed. The large nerves were dissected up a short ways and cut.”

  Lawson remained awake as the doctor worked. “I couldn’t see any blood, or feel anything. But I knew he was cutting,” he later wrote. “I could see his arm moving and see him lift my leg up so he could cut underneath.”

  Sensation started to return to the toes on Lawson’s right foot. He told White that he could feel his ankle. The anesthetic was wearing off—and there wasn’t any more. Two Chinese nurses came alongside Lawson and held his wrists down.

  Lawson watched as White prepared to saw off his leg. “Doc stepped away and walked back quickly with a silver saw,” he wrote. “It made a strange, faraway, soggy sound as he sawed through the bone. Except for the tugging fear that I was coming back too soon, the actual amputation was almost as impersonal to me as watching a log being sawed. I could hear the different sounds of the saw as Doc’s elbow bent and straightened, bent and straightened and the teeth went through thicker and thinner sections. Then there was an almost musical twink, and deep, deep silence inside me as Doc laid aside the saw. The Chinese nurses let go of my wrists. The nurse on the right walked around to the left side of the table. She picked up the leg by the ankle. The other nurse picked up the other, thicker end. I watched the two nurses carry it out the door.”

  White beveled the edges of Lawson’s bone and then began to close the wound layer by layer, using raw silk suture ties. More sensation returned to Lawson’s right leg, making the pilot nervous.

  “Just a few more now,” White assured him.

  Lawson watched the doctor’s arm rise and fall with each suture.

  “Just one more,” he said and then finished.

  White gave Lawson another blood transfusion. He had tapped out his type A donors, so he used his own. It was fortunate in that his blood was type O, commonly known as the universal blood type because it can safely be given to anyone. “The next day,” White wrote, “Ted was better. He was comfortable for the first time since the accident and was lucid for the first time in weeks.”

  The news of the May 6 surrender of American forces on Corregidor arrived as Lawson convalesced, a sad final chapter to the five-month struggle to hold the Philippines.

  The following day White noted with alarm that Lawson was running a low-grade fever, leading the doctor to give him a second pint of his own blood, but Lawson continued to deteriorate. The next day his stump was infected, he stopped eating, and he grew delirious. White could do little more than change his dressing—the wound continued to discharge pus—and give him an intravenous injection and morphine.

  Lawson fell into a semiconscious state plagued by the same bad dream. “It was screwy,” he said. “I thought I was in a small rowboat, off the coast of China. I was rowing and making good time, but someone would always make me change into another boat. The new boat would have no oars. I’d tried to get back in my old boat, but I could never find it. I’d find a lot of rowboats but they’d have no oars.”

  The other aviators watched in alarm as one of the Chinese hospital attendants entered Lawson’s room with a Bible. “He is very sick,” the attendant told the men. “Maybe he won’t be here long.”

  The news rattled Lawson’s fellow fliers. “We were all solemn and silent,” McClure recalled, “hoping he would come thru.”

  Chen got a lead on some sulfathiazole, which White encouraged him to pursue. That Sunday, May 10, $410 worth of the drug arrived, the answer to White’s prayers. He started Lawson on the drug immediately, then removed the stiches from his leg. The stump had healed, but still showed some signs of infection. “Lawson’s temperature normal for the first time!” White wrote in his diary the next day. “Seems on the mend.”

  White helped him out of bed twice and let the pilot rest in a chair. Lawson continued to improve, so much so that a week after his surgery he could drink milk, which the Chinese had boiled, poured into a bottle, and lowered into a well to cool. He followed that with strained soup and mush. A local carpenter made him crutches.

  White busied himself filling teeth and doing eye exams. “Had three more dentistry patients and three eye patients!” he exclaimed in his diary. “Opthalmoscopy and retinoscopy by candlelight!” He even had time to whittle a dagger and buy stamps for his collection, while the locals presented each raider with a cane inscribed, “A keepsake to the officers of our friends and allies of the American Air Force.” “Whatever people can say about the unsanitary conditions, etc., of the Chinese, no one can ever complain about their hospitality,” White wrote in his diary. “They are great people.”

  The other airmen found ways to keep busy as Lawson healed. Through Davy Jones the men learned that most of the raiders had survived, and other news came over the hospital’s radio, which could pick up station KGEI in San Francisco. McClure cheered the success of his beloved St. Louis Cardinals, who would go on to beat the New York Yankees that summer in the World Series, while all the men rejoiced at the news of the American Navy’s victory over the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. “We whooped and yelled like Indians when we got the score on that one,” McClure later wrote. “Any time we could hear of bad fortune for the Japs the day was a success.”

  Japanese bombers droned overhead daily, en rou
te to attack other towns, a constant reminder of the enemy’s advance. White knew time was running short and began to make preparations to press on to Chuchow. The locals threw a farewell feast for the raiders, complete with nine courses and five extras that began with roast watermelon seeds, followed by buffalo, pork, and even shark fins. “It looked like white rubber,” McClure recalled of the delicacy, “and tasted the same.”

  The Japanese onslaught continued; the airmen were out of time. “News not so good. The army and the banks have already left town!” White wrote in his diary on May 17. “Have to leave tomorrow, rain or shine.”

  The men woke early on the morning of the eighteenth to find it cold and rainy. Exactly one month had passed since the raid on Tokyo. White dressed Lawson’s stump, while others helped him into a pair of trousers, the left pant leg pinned up. The aviators then climbed into sedan chairs, pulling oilcloths over them to keep dry

  “I want to show you something,” Chen said to Lawson.

  The porters carried the airman around the hospital and set his chair down alongside a wooden coffin. “It was a new one, made by the same Chinese carpenter who had made my crutches,” Lawson wrote. “It was to have been mine.”

  The airmen set off in the rain, accompanied by the Smith family, Chen, porters, and armed escorts. “We crossed the pontoon bridge over the river and headed up the valley,” White wrote. “We followed the river, crossing and recrossing its stream many times, sometimes on bridges, more often by ferries—small boats poled by coolies or towed across by ropes. The countryside was lovely and green and as the day progressed it slowly cleared and we dried out.”

  The men broke for lunch at 2 p.m. and then set out again. “Many of the hills along the way had beautiful old pagodas on them,” White recalled. “New patches of rice seedlings looked like rich lawns. Occasionally we would pass through a small grove of young pine trees. It was very interesting and beautiful country.”